The Problem with Seeking “The Best”
Let's explore the cost associated with seeking "the best."
We'll cover the following
Cost of seeking the best#
We spend a lot of time seeking “the best” of something. The best schools. The best jobs. The best home. The best cities. The best restaurants. The best partner. The best framework. The best course. The best book. The best movie with the best actors.
Who doesn’t want to have the best? Who wants to live their life settling for “alright”?
Seeking the best has several hidden costs.
Happiness#
You don’t always know that you’ve got the best. You make your decisions under imperfect information — what reviews say, what friends tell you, what the marketing says — and then you buy something.
Seeking the best only to find you have ended up with the second-best is a recipe for disappointment. You end up comparing long feature checklists looking for the most amount of green. Most of which you don’t need. Even picking something, anything, gives you anxiety because you fear missing out.
Cooperation#
Looking for the best transforms your world into a zero-sum finite game rather than a positive-sum infinite game. It’s cancerous to your worldview.
Efficiency#
It is also ridiculously inefficient. The corollary of the Pareto principle is that the last 20% of something is the most expensive, and that’s what you have to sweat if you seek “the best” all the time. It’s fine to seek the best. Just know that you’re going to incur a disproportionately high cost.
Agency#
People game “best-seekers” all the time by defining for you what “best” is. Who wants to be Mayor on Foursquare? Who can compete to get the most subscribers on YouTube? Which wait-service staff will be Employee of the Month? Games to give fake status to people who live in the system, by people who profit off the system. If you seek “good enough,” you reclaim your agency.
“Good Enough” is, well, good enough. Learn to define that for yourself and be happy when you get it. You will be more reliably happy, cooperative, productive, and independent than you ever were.
📝 Author’s Note: There is historically an even more aggressive framing of this principle – “Worse is Better.” This was first coined by Richard Gabriel to describe the idea that software quality (in terms of practical usability) does not necessarily increase with functionality (the full text of the essay is here).
However, I feel the oxymoronic nature of this phrasing implies that “worse” is desirable in all situations. It isn’t. Therefore, I have opted not to use it, in favor of “good enough”.
Introduction: Good Enough is Better than Best
The Dangers of False Confidence